Meet Toby

So we have only had our little kitty for a week and already we have made some big mistakes. First off, a few days after we brought him home,last week, I noticed that he was acting really strange one morning; he wasn't his usual self. He kept walking like he was flat out drunk--stumbling over losing his  balance, walking really slow, and walking into corners all the time, his meow wasn't even the same, and he had diarrhea really bad. I got worried because I had never in my life seen anything like this before, so I called up the vet to make an appointment. Well they didn't have an opening available for a few more days and after I told him what the symptoms were, he told me to take him to an animal hospital right away. So we rushed our little lame kitten to the hospital to see what was going on.

After about 45 minutes of being poked and prodded the doctor came in and told us that our kitty had gone blind. I was crushed. We had a normal, healthy kitten four days earlier, and now he's gone blind?! What happened? So it turned out that it was our fault that Toby went blind. We made a trip to the grocery store the day after we brought him home and picked up some food and other stuff for the kitty along with some dewormer because we hadn't taken him in to get his shots yet. You are supposed to put the dewormer in his food and he wouldn't know the difference. I thought a deworner was a great idea since I caught ring worm as a child from my cat, and I didn't want that to happen again. Anyway, it turned out that we O.D.ed him on the medication and one of the side effects is temporary blindness (even though the bottle never listed side effects of any kind that I saw).

I went to bed that night so sad for my little kitten, but thankfully, a few days after he was diagnosed Toby got better and regained his sight. A few days after that, we noticed that Toby was a boy and not a girl as we had been calling him. So we changed his name from Tessa to Tobias or Toby for short. We sure love this kitty!

I debated whether or not to post this video, but while we were waiting in the hospital Stephen and I could not, for the life of us, stop laughing at the cat because he was so funny walking around stumbling over. The funniest part was when we walked into the corner of the room and just started banging his little head against the wall over and over (I didn't get my phone in time to get that in video). It really wasn't funny because were sad, but we couldn't help but laugh at the same time. This way you can kind of get an idea of what he looked like poor thing.